Part I of this Index was published in Recusant History fifteen years ago, in October 1982. It was designed to serve two purposes: as an appendix to an earlier series of articles in Recusant History, in which I had discussed about thirty of the most important houses; and as a preliminary list of additions and corrections to Granville Squiers, Secret Hiding-Places (1933), which had been out of print since the publisher’s warehouse was bombed on the night of 29 December 1940. In 1989 my own book, also entitled Secret Hiding-Places, was published by Veritas; but, in order to allow room for necessary architectural and genealogical material, it only deals with about 180 houses, against 360 in Squiers, and of the 180 only 120 are in Squiers. Even after 1989, therefore, there remained about 240 houses where the hides had not been discussed in print since 1933, together with a number of others which had never been collected at all. Part II of the Index now lists another 123 houses (making a total of 300), of which 83 were in Squiers and 40 not. There are also further details on a few houses which were included in Part I, but these retain their original reference nos. (in square brackets) and so do not affect these statistics. Houses which were not in Index I but are in Hodgetts 1989 are not included here unless there is more to report on them, as with nos. 230, 236 and 239.

In June 1629 Thomas, Viscount Wentworth was given control of the Northern Commission for Compounding with Recusants and appointed Receiver-General of northern recusant revenues. He was already Lord President of the Council of the North and Lord Lieutenant of Yorkshire, but this new appointment was to extend his power geographically far outside the Council’s jurisdiction. It gave Wentworth the opportunity to demonstrate further his administrative abilities and brought him personal financial advantages. Wentworth’s biographers have customarily given this aspect of his work only cursory attention, but in 1961 Clare Talbot edited a Catholic Record Society volume (n. 53) containing a selection of texts relating to Wentworth’s management of the commission, prefaced by a very informative introduction by the late J. C. H. Aveling which has added much to our knowledge of this part of Wentworth’s administrative work. The texts include over eighty documents, in whole or in part, from the Strafford Papers held in Sheffield Archives which shed much light on the work of the northern commission. There are, however, a number of other important letters, accounts and texts of speeches, both in the Strafford Papers and elsewhere, which deserve attention as they usefully supplement, and occasionally correct, Aveling’s introductory comments.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the neighbouring parishes of West Bromwich, Sedgley and Wolverhampton in South Staffordshire were notorious for popery. Although they lay close together they differed from each other in economy and organisation. West Bromwich was a rural parish with available water power, Sedgley was a rural parish on the coal outcrop with metal working, quarrying and lime burning. Wolverhampton was an ancient Minster with a market town, a seignorial borough set in a large Foreign containing three chapelries and many hamlets.

During the last week of February 1606, the survival of Catholicism in England depended on whether Nicholas Owen could remain silent under prolonged and ruthless torture. A few months later, John Gerard wrote of him:

The letters of Mary Knatchbull, abbess of the English Benedictine Convent in Ghent between 1650 and her death in 1696, are of considerable interest. They reveal a woman operating with significant influence in two discrete spheres: the enclosed cloister and the royalist court in exile. This article will consider briefly the religious career of Mary Knatchbull and her importance to the Benedictines of Ghent, before examining in detail her part in the restoration of Charles II. It examines the unexpressed dichotomy of seemingly irreconcilable rôles performed by a member of an enclosed Order who on the one hand, in fulfilling her vows, was submissive and obedient, and yet on the other, was able to communicate with senior royalist advisers confidently and involve herself in the strategic planning of the campaign for the return of Charles II to England. As abbess, Mary Knatchbull led her community effectively at a difficult time. Under her leadership the convent survived an expensive building programme, established a successful new house and maintained high standards of practice in the religious life of the convent. From conventual records, it is clear that she was considered one of the outstanding abbesses of the seventeenth century in the English Benedictine community. Her correspondence with the royalists ministers in exile shows her opinions were taken seriously. She was regarded as a competent organiser and she had extensive links covering Flanders, France and England that kept her in touch with developments of interest to the king. Hitherto her life has been little known and published writing has been largely devoted to her rôle as an abbess. Mary Knatchbull’s life challenges categorisation and shows the importance of flexibility of approach to understanding the rôle of women in the early modern period.

Horses by Papists are not to be ridden,
But sure the Muses horse was ne’er forbidden.
For in no rate-book was it ever found,
That Pegasus was valued at five pound.
John Dryden

These lines, written at the end of the seventeenth century, were a wry comment on the ban on the ownership of horses valued at over five pounds which was imposed upon Catholics from 1689 by the Whig ministry of William and Mary and which remained in force, in theory, until the abolition of the penal laws in 1844. Like most of the penal laws its application had all but ceased by the middle of the eighteenth century but in the period under consideration the Privy Council made considerable efforts to ensure the enforcement of the ban. It did so sometimes through a genuine fear of Jacobite uprising and subversion, on other occasions to stir up a renewed paranoia about popery (and thus encourage loyalty from all Protestants) and always to try to weaken the resolve of Catholics to retain their faith. Alexander Pope tells the story of Thomas Gage of Shirburn who had his team of Flemish coach horses seized by the authorities in 1715. Visiting London, he became so jealous of the sight of other people’s coach horses passing by that he apostatised then and there and took the Oath of Abjuration.

In the 1740s the English Jesuit house at Liège where students of philosophy and theology were prepared for the priesthood was in financial difficulties. One of the main supports of the college was an annual pension from Bavaria but in the 1740s Bavaria was involved in war and the pension was frequently not paid. The number in the community had to be reduced, many students being charitably welcomed in other Jesuit houses in Europe. It was at this time when the finances of the English province were strained that two plans came up for consideration. One was to extend the apostolate of the Maryland English Jesuit mission in Pennsylvania; the other was to open at Boulogne a preparatory school for St. Omers College. The problem was how to obtain the necessary funds.

‘Charges that he [John Sergeant] was a disciple of Blacklow [Thomas White] … rest on … unsatisfactory evidence.’ Godfrey Anstruther’s conclusion has not, so far as I know, been directly challenged; so this note aims belatedly to offer some evidence in support of Sergeant’s close Blackloist connections.

John Sergeant (1623–1707) is now usually remembered as the leading Catholic protagonist in the ‘Rule of Faith’ debates, though he has also been presented as an informer at the time of the so-called Popish Plot, and as a far from negligible philosopher. It will be argued here that, in both theology and philosophy, he was essentially a follower of Thomas White (1593–1676), leader of the influential faction of English Catholics who derived from his best-known alias their title of ‘Blackloists’; for Sergeant himself, in the words of Bishop Richard Russell quoted in the title, ‘everywhere proclaimed himself White’s disciple’.

The above are strong words, even from a forthright Yorkshirewoman, and they are almost startling when one considers how submissive, personally, was their author to all authority in the Church. But, in this Memorial, Mary Ward describes the constitution she envisages for her Institute. The firm lines she draws are even more accentuated in her Third Plan of 1622: ‘We most humbly beg that the entire hierarchical structure of this work should depend entirely on the Holy See and not on any other authority’. Another document headed Reasons why we may not alter makes it clear that the proposals admit of no compromise. The genesis of this attitude is not far to seek. Mary Ward considered she had received divine intimation that she was to undertake some new work to the greater glory of God and for this she was to follow St. Ignatius’ Society of Jesus with its direct responsibility to the Holy See. Sr. Immolata Wetter points out that Mary Ward’s ideas were further sharpened by the contemporary situation of the Catholic Church in England: ‘adherence to the primacy of the Pope distinguished the English martyrs and confessors of the faith. For their loyalty to the Vicar of Christ these brave men and women suffered restrictions both in public and private life.

Some of the multifarious literary activities of Captain John Stevens have received attention from specialists. His journal of the Irish wars of 1688–91, not published until 1912, is now generally recognised as being one of the most important primary sources for the campaign. His place in the history of travel writing, as the translator into English of classical works in Spanish and Portuguese on the history, geography and ethnology of the Iberian world, has been established by Dr. Colin Steele. His major contribution to English monastic history, as the translator and continuator of Sir Thomas Dugdale, though less well known, and deserving closer study, has been recognised by David Douglas. More recently a Portuguese scholar has paid tribute to him as one of the first writers to introduce the English reader to Portuguese history and literature. English Hispanists have acknowledged his prolific output as a translator of Spanish authors, notably Cervantes and Quevedo. More controversially, in Pat Rogers’s fascinating study of the literary underclass in London during the age of Pope and Swift, he is ignominiously—and, I shall argue, unjustly—indexed under the heading ‘Dunces and their allies’.

A good deal of attention has been paid in recent years to the relationships between Methodists and Catholics in England in the eighteenth century and, in particular, to John Wesley’s own dealings with Catholics and Catholicism. This article examines a link with Catholicism at the very heart of Methodism’s first family: the involvement of Samuel Wesley (1766–1837), the younger of the two musician sons of Charles Wesley, and the nephew of John. As will be seen below, Wesley converted in 1784, marking the occasion by composing an elaborate setting of the Ordinary of the Mass (the Missa de Spiritu Sancto) which he sent to Pope Pius VI. This article discusses the background to the composition of the Mass, its musical content, and the subsequent history of its autograph score. It is prompted by the publication of a performing edition of the work and by a subsequent performance (almost certainly the world première) in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, on 10 September 1997, which was recorded and later broadcast on both Irish and British radio.

Fr Thomas More—the last descendant in the direct male line of St.Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England—died on 20 May 1795 in Bath. He had been the Jesuit provincial superior at the time of the suppression of the Society in 1773.

Thomas More was the eldest of the five children of Thomas and Catherine (née Giffard) of Barnborough or Bamburg Hall in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Born on 19 September 1722, he was followed by Christopher, Bridget, Catherine and Mary. Both sons became Jesuits. Bridget married twice—Peter Metcalfe and Robert Dalton and had descendants; she died in 1797. Catherine died unmarried in 1786. Mary became Sister Mary Augustine of the Austin Canonesses at Bruges and died in 1807. Their home, Barnborough Hall, had been in the family since John, the only son of St. Thomas, had acquired it by his marriage to Anne Cresacre and it remained so until the nineteenth century.

Kenney, Peter James (1779–1841), was born in Dublin, probably at 28 Drogheda Street, on 7 July, 1779. His father, Peter, and his mother, formerly Ellen Molloy, ran a small business. Apart from Peter, the other known children were Anne Mary, who joined the convent of the Sisters of St. Clare, and an older brother, or half-brother, Michael, who set up an apothecary’s shop in Waterford.

Peter was born, therefore, in the decade which saw the American Revolution, the Suppression of the Jesuits and, in Ireland, the birth of Daniel O’Connell—destined to become ‘The Liberator’. The need to keep Ireland quiet during the American conflict, led to concessions to the Catholic population. The first of these was in 1778. Others followed when the French Revolution raised possibilities of unrest. In 1792 the establishment of Catholic colleges was allowed, and entry to the legal profession. These led to the founding of Carlow College and to Daniel O’Connell’s emergence as a lawyer. The following year the Irish parliament was obliged by the government to extend the parliamentary franchise to Catholics. Increased freedom, however, and the government’s connivance at the non-application of the penal laws, led to increased resentment against the laws themselves and, among middle-class Catholics, to a relishing of Edmund Burke’s celebrated reminder to the House of Commons in 1780, that ‘connivance is the relaxation of slavery, not the definition of liberty’.

Schoolboy letters do not often survive, no doubt because they are notoriously uninformative; however the collection reproduced here can claim something more than mere scarcity value. It reveals a little of what it was like to be a schoolboy at Douai; the themes of pocket money, illness, injury, discontent, delayed correspondence, and the need for various items from home will be familiar to those who have ever written or received such letters; there is perhaps a greater degree of overt piety than would nowadays be expected. We do also see something of the means by which pupils were escorted to Douai (II, III), and something of the conveyance of Catholic books and objects of devotion from Douai to England (V, VI); there is information about Douai custom in the matter of leaving presents (XII). There is a letter from the boys’ father, and one each from Rev. Christopher Banks, from Rev. Francis Gage (the President), and from Rev. Thomas Lockwood, the latter in particular having composed a masterpiece of tact and concern.

The last years of the English Conceptionist nuns, the Blue Nuns, were spent in a large corner house in Magdalen Street, Norwich, from which the cheerful abbess, Mother Bernard Green, wrote notes to their benefactress, Lady Jerningham, at Cossey. This community had for 140 years lived near the Bastille in Paris. It had seen the Duchess of Cleveland quête in its church, Mary of Modena at a profession; it had taught girls who grew up to be notable English Catholic ladies, including Lady Jerningham herself. It had suffered the deaths of too many of its small community during and after the Revolution. Like the Benedictines of Montargis and the Austins of Bruges, the refugee Blue nun community knew the charity of the Jerningham family, but unlike those two flourishing houses it died out before its benefactors did. For a brief period, 1800–1805, the Blue Nuns kept choir, taught catechism, made purses, and received visitors in Norwich.

Anti-Catholicism, represented in the era of the eve of Emancipation by a rich genre of polemical literature focusing on the supposed ‘difficulties of Romanism’, has been the subject of much recent study; notably for the eighteenth century by Colin Haydon, and for the nineteenth, by Walter Amstein, Edward Norman, D. G. Paz, Walter Ralls, F. M. Wallis and John Wolffe. In contrast, English Catholic controversial writing against the Church of England, focusing on what one Catholic writer (in a conscious reversal of the stock Anglican polemical title) called the ‘difficulties of Protestantism’, with notable exceptions such as Sheridan Gilley, Leo Gooch and Brian Carter, 5 has been comparatively neglected for the half century prior to the dawn of the Oxford Movement in 1833.

In an 1885 article on ‘Roman Catholics and Parliamentary Representation,’ The Times suggested ‘it is a strange thing that although the Catholic Emancipation Bill was passed in 1829, very few members of that faith have succeeded in holding seats for English constituencies.’ During the past few decades a number of historians have published important studies of the electoral influence of Catholics in the nineteenth century, but most of these works have paid little attention to the Catholics who were Members of Pariliament. But any attempt to understand the Catholic contribution to public life in the nineteenth century surely requires an analysis of the Catholic M.P.s.

In 1917 Shane Leslie published a general article in The Dublin Review, quoting extensive passages from the extant correspondence between Florence Nightingale and Henry Edward Manning, the bulk of it written in 1852 when Nightingale was considering conversion to Roman Catholicism. The letters are of great importance for understanding her character and eventual theological position. Although only Nightingale’s part of the correspondence is extant, it is of value, as well, to students of Manning and is of particular interest for the background it provides to disagreements between the Nightingale and Mary Stanley nursing contingents in the Crimea, 1854–1855.

Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars has reinvigorated the debate over the nature of late mediaeval religious practice and belief, examining the ‘richness and complexity of the religious system by which men and women structured their experiences of the world, and their hopes and aspirations within and beyond it.’ Duffy questions the assumption that there was in that period a wide gulf between ‘popular’ and ‘élite’ religion. In so doing he has not only illuminated the religious practices and beliefs of late mediaeval England but he has stimulated discussion about the relationship between ‘popular’ and ‘élite’ religion in other periods. Duffy eschews the use of the term ‘popular religion’, which he argues carries questionable assumptions about the nature of ‘non-popular’ religion and about the gap between the two. He prefers ‘traditional religion’, on the grounds that it does greater justice to ‘the shared and inherited character of the religious beliefs and practices of the people…’ ‘Traditional religion’ while being rooted in inherited and shared beliefs was, nevertheless, capable of great flexibility and variety.